Little of that happened. Advertising revenues declined for the year, 6.4 percent by my estimate. Profits on net earnings hovered around 5 percent. Newsroom cuts continued, though not so severe as those of 2008 and 2009.

“The destination newspaper organizations are trying to reach is pretty clear now — more robust digital enterprises to pick up the slack as print advertising and circulation falls. The path from here to there, unfortunately, once again is not clear at all.”

The industry still hopes to find a four-lane highway or yellow brick road leading to a financially stable future. Instead, the quest continues to be more like chopping through a dense jungle with a machete.

As the recession eased, all media formats except newspapers booked increases in ad revenues in 2010.With autos recovering and a political advertising bonanza, local TV stations, in fact, were up 17 percent. Alas, that will not be repeatable in 2011. CNBC, with a small audience but well-targeted to active investors, grew revenues 7 percent to $723 million. That is twice what MSNBC generated and nearly equal to the revenues of NBC’s news division. While newspapers did not increase ad revenues overall, by my projections the industry increased the share of total ad revenues from digital from about 10 percent in 2009 to 11.3 percent last year. (And some of that improvement results from print advertising’s continued decline).

The results of the American Society of News Editors annual newsroom census are still a month away. But we are predicting additional declines in the range of 1,000 to 1,500 full-time newspaper professional jobs during 2010. We also note that online news hires for ventures like AOL’s Patch and Bloomberg may roughly equal the newspaper industry’s losses.

Mobile advertising, while growing fast, still amounts to only 3 percent of the total for digital, let alone buffering long-term ad losses on legacy platforms. Tablet and e-reader ownership are at 7 percent and 6 percent respectively, though likely to show big increases this year.

Tom Rosenstiel, president of the Project for Excellence in Journalism — the Pew-funded unit that produces the report — identifies loss of control to device-makers and aggregators as the media trend of the year. It’s not just having to split revenues that hurts traditional news outlets, but ceding control of the customer and related data, a critical strategic asset in the digital era.

Meanwhile, upstart Groupon dominates the deal-of-the-day category, a tough drain on local merchant advertising, with more than 50 million customers worldwide. When newspapers partner with Groupon or one of its rivals, they get just a third of the proceeds of the deal.

The slow-to-develop mobile and tablet revenue streams are part of what is making slow work of the industry’s path to a broader mix of revenues.

In that regard, I found a secondary question in the mobile news survey especially disturbing. The survey results are drawn from a sampling of more than 2,000 adults in January of this year, so the results are both current and credible.

Rosenstiel has made the point in previous reports and presentations that even people who rarely or never read a newspaper get a healthy share of their news from that source — since newspapers still generate the lion’s share of local reporting that others aggregate or comment upon.

But the 2011 news consumer doesn’t see it that way. So if print revenue continues to fall away faster than newspapers can generate new revenue streams, there will likely be further losses in local coverage, undetected and generally unmourned.